Newt Gingrich is a smart guy.  And he may have more media experience than anyone running or about to run for president. So how did he walk into this quote last weekend?

“I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

As much as John Stewart can be annoying, he, too, is a smart guy, and he didn’t let the opportunity to lampoon Gingrich pass last night. How can you have a secular atheist country dominated by radical Islamists?, Stewart pointedly asked. It’s a good question.

The better question, though, is “what on earth is Newt Gingrich doing talking about a radical Islamic takeover in America?  Seriously?  Is that really where he wants to go in his campaign? I know he has to appeal to lots of people, but I’m not sure the country can bear a campaign like right now.

There is a fatal condition in politics called being too smart by half, and Mr. Gingrich has on occasion demonstrated bouts of it. There must be something he can take for that.  Otherwise, his long-calculated candidacy will be a brief one, and the country will be lesser for it.

The back of the public service unions has been broken.  New York just made it official.

While most of the country watched the goings on in Wisconsin and Ohio, the public service unions were throwing everything they had at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and the New York State Legislature, which, historically, buckles under union pressure.

Not this time.  This time the governor and the State Senate held firm.  They did not budge on taxes and they did not budge on spending cuts.

No one is buying the union scare tactics anymore.  Neither are they buying the intimidation methods.  The reason is that the public stands squarely behind those working to save our states from insolvency.  Even when that means making the tough calls. Joe Citizen gets it.

States do not have a revenue problem.  They have a spending problem – and pension solvency problems.  All the placards, chants, slogans, telephone calls, television ads, radio spots, billboards, emails, and pizzas delivered to protesters at state capitols in the night mean nothing in the face of that new reality.

It may take time to roll back the unsustainable benefits handed public service unions employees over the years.  But 2011 is the year the when public unions lost their forward  momentum. The rebuke of public service union pressure in Wisconsin was crippling.  Losing in New York may be the coup de grâce.

This is bound to raise eyebrows. The New York Times is reporting that the Central Intelligence Agency has boots on the ground in Libya.  Will the President be making another speech soon?

Writes The Times: “While President Obama has insisted that no American ground troops join in the Libyan campaign, small groups of C.I.A. operatives have been working in Libya for several weeks and are part of a shadow force of Westerners that the Obama administration hopes can help set back Colonel Qaddafi’s military, the officials said.

“The C.I.A. presence comprises an unknown number of American officers who had worked at the spy agency’s station in Tripoli and those who arrived more recently. In addition, current and former British officials said, dozens of British special forces and MI6 intelligence officers are working inside Libya. The British operatives have been directing airstrikes from British Tornado jets and gathering intelligence about the whereabouts of Libyan government tank columns, artillery pieces, and missile installations, the officials said.”

P.S.:  For the record, I thought very early on that air raids on Libya were a good idea with the simple reasoning: If you have a chance to help take down Gadaffi with the support of the Arab League, take it. I still do.  But can you imagine the outright madness of the CIA advising al Qaeda elements among the rebels? It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Fast Tube by Casper

A friend and client, the President of the National Bible Association,  is working with the Pentagon to find ways to reduce the suicide rate among returning soldiers. The numbers are staggering. The military’s suicide rate has never been higher, and Admiral Mullens, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently acknowledged that with more soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, suicides among military veterans are expected to grow worse.  To give you an idea of how serious the problem is, consider this: More Vietnam veterans have now died from suicide than died in the war.  The suicide rate among those returning from Afghanistan may exceed that.

No one seems to know why some soldiers assimilate back into civilian life relatively easily, while others have real problems.  But the statistics clearly show that the crisis is real.

If you have a spare eight minutes and 45 seconds, I very much recommend watching the NPR video clip above.  It gives us a glimpse of the dramatic decline of one soldier suffering from post traumatic stress. The police officer featured demonstrates the best of America.

It’s amazing that fast-food restaurants have survived since New York City mandated calorie estimates on their menus.

I haven’t bought a morsel of food at Starbuck’s, for example, since the law took effect.  Same thing at my local Burger King where I bring my daughter to play on a jungle gym once in a while:  Black coffee.  That’s it. There must be others out there who do the same, and that loss of sales must add up.

Who knew that a bagel or a grilled chicken sandwich or an insty-winsty doughnut could pack 150,000 calories? And don’t even peek at the Frappuccinos. Armed with calorie information, it becomes easier to say “no thanks” than to actually order something.

The Daily News has a story out today about restaurants going the other way — those serving food with obscene calorie, fat, and sodium content. Just looking at the pictures will put you on a treadmill. There is the Bacon Maple Sundae and the Fried Cheese Melt at Denny’s; the new KFC sandwich with deep fried chicken breasts replacing the bread; the “Craz-E-Burger,” featuring a bacon cheeseburger between two deep fried Krispy Kreme doughnuts; deep fried pizza; chocolate covered bacon (that sounds good); the “Quadruple Bypass Burger”; the 2,000 calorie Quizznos Tuna Sub, and more. Yes much, much more!

People voluntarily eat this stuff.  How else can one explain it being on a menu. I wonder, though, how many of these items are sold when the nutritional content is posted plainly on the menu. I would love to see comparative sales figures from fast food restaurants in cities with calorie menus and cities without.

I’ve been pretty clear on these pages that I don’t like government over-reach, and I’ve criticized spending taxpayer money on over-the-top public health campaigns.  But I am deeply ambivalent about these  mandated calorie menus. They clearly step over the line of government authority, in my opinion, and I suspect they will cost restaurants millions of dollars in lost revenue every year, but damned if I don’t find them helpful.

I know that makes me a hypocrite, but so be it. It saved me a small fortune at Starbuck’s last year. Although I now see half-sized 150-calorie doughnuts on sale there, which I suppose is the whole point of the government’s exercise.

What’s next?  The Little Mac?

I’ve never watched Bill Maher.

Well, that’s not exactly true. I must have seen him at least once, because something made me develop an immediate and visceral dislike for the guy. If I see him on a television screen, I avert my eyes and change the channel. If I saw him walking down the street, I’d cross to the opposite sidewalk. If I was in a foxhole with him, I’d turn him out.

I would normally be ashamed to admit something like that  because my grandmothers taught me never to say anything bad about anyone, and they meant it. But reading about Maher’s recent stand up “comedy” routine instills some confidence in me that, not only might both grandmother’s shower forgiveness on me from heaven for speaking candidly  about my feelings for Maher, but they might even offer quiet encouragement. Because they also taught me to be polite to girls, and Maher is anything but.

Maher has taken to calling Sarah Palin the “C” word in his stand-up routine. Evidently he finds this funny, or thinks others will. It’s the worst thing you can call a woman, and Maher evidently relishes in it.

Maher could never get away with saying that on his television show, even given HBO’s politics and standards. He’d be hounded off the air in a week. So he saves the truly vile stuff in his heart for the stage, where he can hide behind the guise of Lenny-Bruce comedic freedoms.

Brave Democratic columnist Kirsten Powers — she’s one of the most free-thinking minds in America today — has taken Maher to task for his previous vulgarity aimed at Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachman, but he pretty much gets away with it from everyone else on his side of the aisle.

Sarah Palin may be disliked by the Left — and by a good chunk of the Right — but I cannot think of a single liberal friend who would be okay with Maher’s excessively crude word choice. So why don’t prominent leaders on the Left say something about Maher?

Yes, we on the Right have our jackass moments, too. Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter can say stupid and hurtful things, and they say them to be mean. But the “C” word? C’mon. Someone of note on the Left has to say something.  That type of language cannot be allowed to become de rigueur in American politics.

My grandmothers would say I need to pray for Maher. And so I will.  I pray that as soon as the pencil-necked, pasty-faced, waxed-nose ass of a human being is yanked off the air, he catches a cold hard glimpse of the ungentlemanly horror that is he in the mirror and becomes immediately inspired to pursue a path to redemption.

Does that count?

US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) got busted coaching his fellow Democrats on a conference call today to use the word “extreme” when talking about Republican budget cuts.  He was unaware that members of the news media were on the line.

“I always use extreme,” Schumer said, according to a Washington Times reporter on the call, “that is what the caucus instructed me to use.”

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Wish I had seen more of this interview. Michael Moore continues to insist that the wealth accumulated by Americans belongs not to them and their families, but to the country.  Even on a tongue-in-cheek show like The Colbert Report, Moore bristles when called out as a hypocrite.  The reportedly money-obsessed Moore is worth an estimated $25-50 million.  An obvious and simple demonstration of his conviction would be for Moore to donate his money to the IRS.  If he really believes the money is not his, what’s stopping him?

In two weeks the country will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War. It began on April 12, 1861 when confederate Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard — they don’t make names like that anymore — ordered southern artillery officers to open fire on federally-occupied Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, S.C. The war ended almost exactly four years later, on April 9, 1865, with more than 625,000 Americans having been killed — about two percent of the U.S. population at the time.

One hears almost nothing about the Civil War sesquicentennial, at least not in New York, even though New York suffered more battlefield deaths in the war  — 46,000-plus  — than any other state, Northern or Southern. New York City’s famed Fighting 69th Regiment had a 75% casualty rate.

Budget cuts have been cited as the reason, but that’s a bunch of bunk. When you cut to the chase, the reason we’re not making a big deal in marking the occasion is that we no longer care enough about the Civil War. We do not make remembering it a priority. That, as one of my teenage daughters would say, is not cool.

The Civil War happened a blink-of-an-eye ago in relative terms.  Its veterans were marching in parades into the 1940’s.  The last veteran, Albert Woolson, a Minnesota drummer boy, died in 1956, seven years before I was born.  Almost every town in America has a Civil War memorial – and for good reason.  It was a pretty big deal, what with the end of slavery and all…

The best summation of the Civil War I’ve heard was spoken by the great southern historian Shelby Foote, although he was not its originator: “Before the Civil War, one would say the United States are…  After the Civil War, one would say the United States is…”

Well the United States is forgetting its history.  And that’s a crime.

“Slavery was the primary, central, cause of secession.  The Civil War was necessary to bring about the abolition of slavery. Abolishing slavery was morally imperative and necessary, and it’s regrettable that it took the Civil War to do it. But it did.”, Mississippi Governor and presidential aspirant Haley Barbour (March 25).